Classical Hollywood or The Golden Age of Hollywood (1930s-1948)
Film Noir (1940-1958)
Italian Neorealism (1944–1952) "The Golden Age" of Italian Cinema
French New Wave (late1950s-1960s)
New Hollywood or post-Classical Hollywood, or "American New Wave" (late1960s- early1980s)
Contemporary Period (1980s-Today)
Chinese Film (A short history)
Resource sites:
www.filmsite.org www.filmnoir.com a full list of web resources are in the IB DP Film Resources Tab on the right
Silent Era
http://www.silentera.com/ From Filmsite.org: Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast.
By the mid-20s, movies were big business (with a capital investment totaling over $2 billion) with some theatres offering double features. By the end of the decade, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the demand for films was greater than ever. Most people are unaware that the greatest output of feature films in the US occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (averaging about 800 film releases in a year) - nowadays, Hollywood usually produces less than 500 films in a year. Throughout most of the decade, silent films were the predominant product of the film industry, having evolved from vaudevillian roots. But the films were becoming bigger (or longer), costlier, and more polished.
They were being manufactured, assembly-line style, in Hollywood's 'entertainment factories,' in which production was broken down and organized into its various components (writing, costuming, makeup, directing, etc.).
Even the earliest films were organized into genres or types, with instantly-recognizable storylines, settings, costumes, and characters.The major genre emphasis was on swashbucklers, historical extravaganzas, and melodramas, although all kinds of films were being produced throughout the decade.
Nanook of the North - 1922
Films varied from sexy melodramas and biblical epics by Cecil B. DeMille, to westerns (such as Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923)), horror films, gangster/crime films, war films, the first feature documentary or non-fictional narrative film (Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922)), romances, mysteries, and comedies (from the silent comic masters Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd).
Important Films from the Silent Era
The General 1926 Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman USA
Metropolis 1927 Fritz Lang Germany
Sunrise 1927 F.W. Murnau USA
City Lights 1931 Charles Chaplin USA
Nosferatu 1922 F.W. Murnau Germany
The Gold Rush 1925 Charles Chaplin USA
La passion et la mort de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] 1928 Carl Theodor DreyerFrance
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] 1920 Robert WieneGermany
Bronenosets ‘Potyomkin’ [The Battleship Potemkin] 1925 Sergei M. Eisenstein USSR
Greed 1924 Erich von Stroheim USA
Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box] 1929 G.W. Pabst Germany
The Birth of a Nation 1915 D.W. Griffith USA
Nanook of the North (first successful feature length documentary film) 1922 Robert Flaherty USA
Important Directors from the Silent Era
Buster Keaton
D.W. Griffith
Charlie Chaplin
Cecil B. DeMille
Erich von Stroheim
George Melies
Fritz Lang
F.W. Murnau
Sergei Eisenstein
German Expressionism
German Expressionism is a film movement that emphasizes on the expression of inner thoughts or emotions through the control of stylistic elements.
German Expressionism was very influential and it's influence began appearing in Hollywood films in the late 30s and 40s.
The film movement, having born directly under the influenced of German’s defeat during World War I, was an expressive form used to describe the mentality of a defeated nation stricken with poverty and anger.
German Expressionist films are therefore notable for their dark themes of insanity, horror, death and fatality that translate prevalently into the film’s mise-en-scene and narrative.
It counters the principle of realism and practices extreme distortion as means to communicate inner emotional reality.
Old ideals and conventional photographic representation of reality is discarded to convey messages in heavy stylization that becomes symbolic of the real world.
The story takes place in a constructed reality in which the characters live in a world of deformity. This is done to express a subjective viewpoint by abstracting realistic details and contingencies, bringing out the essence of an object, situation or state of mind.
The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects.
The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal and other "intellectual" topics.
Two genres that were especially influenced by Expressionism are horror film and film noir.
Significant Themes
A fascination with the enticing yet often wretched experiences of modern urban life.
The enduring solace associated with nature and religion.
The naked body and its potential to signify primal emotion
Emotionally charged portraiture
And, most pivotally, the need to confront the devastating experience of World War I and its aftermath.
Formal Elements Chiaroscuro lighting: lighting that employs extreme contrasts of light and dark, thus creating dramatic shadows.
A preoccupation with mirrors, glass, and other reflective surfaces.
The use of anthropomorphism, which is the attribution of a human form, human characteristics, or human behavior to non- human things.
An interest in abstractionism, which is a style of art that privileges internal form over pictorial representation
- Nancy West from the University of Missouri,Columbia
The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System (1920s-1930s)
The studio system was essentially born with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars by the studio's production chief and in-house publicity departments. The studio system was dominated by the Big 5. The Big 5 were the studios that controlled Hollywood: The Big 5 1. Metro-Golden-Mayer 2. Warner Brothers 3. Paramount 4. Fox Film (renamed 20th Century Fox in 1935) 5. RKO From www.filmsite.org: The Big-Five studios had vast studios with elaborate sets for film production. They owned their own film-exhibiting theatres (about 50% of the seating capacity in the US in mostly first-run houses in major cities), as well as production and distribution facilities. They distributed their films to this network of studio-owned, first-run theaters (or movie palaces), mostly in urban areas, which charged high ticket prices and drew huge audiences. They required blind or block bookings of films, whereby theatre owners were required to rent a block of films (often cheaply-made, less-desirable B-pictures) in order for the studio to agree to distribute the one prestige A-level picture that the theatre owner wanted to exhibit. This technique set the terms for a film's release and patterns of exhibition and guaranteed success for the studio's productions.
The Small Three 1. Universal 2. United Artists 3. Columbia
United Artists was formed in 1919 by movie industry icons Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith as an independent company to produce and distribute their films.
The studio system would dominate for 3 decades before losing its tight grip over the American film industry at the end of The Golden Age of Hollywood in the late 1940s.
Classical Hollywood (1930-1945) or The Golden Age of Hollywood (1930s-1948)
The 1930s decade (and most of the 1940s as well) has been nostalgically labeled "The Golden Age of Hollywood" (although most of the output of the decade was black-and-white).
The 30s was also the decade of the sound and color revolutions and the advance of the 'talkies', and the further development of film genres (gangster films, musicals, newspaper-reporting films, historical biopics, social-realism films, lighthearted screwball comedies, westerns and horror to name a few).
It was the era in which the silent period ended.
In the late 30s, the two most famous color films were produced: **The Wizard of Oz (1939)** and **Gone with the Wind (1939)**, with Technicolor, which was very expensive. Special-effects processes were advanced by the late 1930s, making it possible for many more films to be shot on sets rather than on-location. In 1937, the Disney-produced **Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)** was the first feature-length animated film - a milestone.
The End of the 1940s, and the Beginning of the End of the Studio System: At the end of this decade, reeling from depression, WWII, problems of the return to peacetime, and the ominous arrival of the atomic bomb, the world was a more cynical, chaotic, economically-unsure and film-noirish place. Lawsuits stripped the studios of their lucrative practices. By the late 1940s, the motion picture industry surely faced its period of greatest crisis and challenge, with the depressing bleakness of the Cold War on the horizon. Hollywood suddenly found itself with many threatening forces at the close of the 40s and the start of the next decade:
the coming of television forcing potential moviegoers to remain at home
blacklisting and McCarthyism
a 1945 studio labor union strike that raised salaries 25% for studio employees
a short-lived 75% import duty, from 1947-1948, that restricted the import of all US films into the UK
the gradual decline of theatre-attending audiences
inflation that raised film production costs
anti-trust rulings by the US government against the studios
Block-booking of films was declared illegal
Studios were forced to divest themselves of their studio-owned theatre chains
Now that the studios would have to achieve box-office success based not on their marketplace strength but on the quality of their films the stability of the studio system of marketing was severely threatened and began to crumble. They were pressured to usher in an era of competition, free agent stars and auteur directors, and many of them were forced to begin selling film rights to pre-1948 films to television to bolster profits.
The transition from The Golden Age in Hollywood to Film Noir shows how film is influenced by the sociocultural realities of the world at a given point in history. During The Golden Age of Hollywood, films were dreamy, fantastic, escapist, and fun. That was before World War II. After the war, the world changed and film did as well. Enter Film Noir.
The Name Film Noir (French black cinema) derives from the French published novels (Serie Noire - the black series).
Coined by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 who noticed a group of Dark and cynical American crime and detective films released in France theater following the war.
Noir movies are almost invariably set in an urban environment and display high contrast lighting which produce hard and unfriendly shadows. Characterized by the sense of impending disaster and utter fatalism, These pictures find their roots in the German Cinema of the 1920’s.
Film Noir contains a set of Archetypical Characters:
The male hero is often an Outlaw, a misfit, or a jaded Gumshoe.
Femme Fatale - a mysterious woman whose seductive behavior foreshadows the hero's inevitable doom.
Bad Girl - dispensable and often abused woman.
Characteristics:
•Melancholy
•Alienated
•Bleakness
•Disillusionment
•Disenchantment
•Pessimism
•Ambiguity
•Moral corruption
•Evil
•Desperation
•Paranoia
PRIMARY Characteristics
Heroes are corrupt characters. Distinctively cynical, tarnished, obsessive, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure.
Villains include down and out, conflicted hard-boiled detective or Private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, alone wolf, a socio-path,crooks , war veterans, politicians, petty criminals, murderers.
Storyline - elliptical, non-linear and twisting.
Narratives - Frequently complex, maze- like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), witty, razor- sharp and acerbic dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration.
Plot - Amnesia suffered by the protagonist was a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent man who fell victim to temptation or was framed. Revelations regarding the hero were made to explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life.
Camera and Lighting- Expressionistic lighting •Deep-focus or depth of field camera work,
•Disorienting visual schemes
•Juxtaposition of elements
•Ominous shadows
•Skewed camera angles (usually vertical or diagonal rather than horizontal),
•Circling cigarette smoke
Camera and Lighting-
•Unbalanced or moody compositions.
•Settings were often interiors with low-key (or single-source) lighting
•Venetian-blinded windows and rooms, and dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances.
•Exteriors were often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleyways, rain-slicked or mean streets, flashing neon lights, and low key lighting.
•Story locations were often in murky and dark streets, dimly-lit and low-rent apartments and hotel rooms of big cities, or abandoned warehouses. [Often-times, war-time scarcities were the reason for the reduced budgets and shadowy, stark sets of B-pictures and film noirs.]
Prominent Directors
•Orsen Welles
•John Huston
•Billy Wilder
•Edgar Ulmer
•Douglas Sirk
•Robert Siodmak
•Fritz Lang
•Otto Perminger
•Henry Hathway
•And Howard Hawks
Noir Films -
•Citizen Kane (1941)
•The Maltese Falcon (1941)
•The Gun for Hire (1942)
•Double Indemnity (1944)
•The Blue Dahlia (1946)
•Out of The Past (1947)
•The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
•The White Heat (1949)
•Touch of Evil (1958)
•Psycho (1960)
•The Trial (1962)
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Italian Neorealism (1944-1952) (aka Golden Age of Italian Cinema)
Films about the poor and working class, "realism." Roberto Rossellini, one of Italian neo-realism's pre-eminent directors, defined it as, “above all a moral position from which to look at the world”. Coming in the wake of studio-bound melodramas of the Fascist regime – ‘white telephone’ films – neo-realist films demonstrated a new social consciousness, with their emphasis on working class hardship and the daily struggle to get by in post-war Italy, where the shadow of defeat lay over its material conditions of economic hardship in war-damaged cities.
Italian Neorealism History
Italian Neorealism came about as World War II ended and Benito Mussolini's government fell, causing the Italian film industry to lose its centre.
Neorealism was a sign of cultural change and social progress in Italy.
•The first neorealist film is generally thought to be Obsession by Luchino Visconti (1943).
•Neorealism became famous globally in 1946 with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival as the first major film produced in Italy after the war.
•Italian Neorealism rapidly declined in the early 1950s.
•Liberal and socialist parties were having a hard time presenting their message.
•Levels of income were gradually starting to rise and the first positive effects of the Italian economic miracle period began to show. As a consequence, most Italians favoured the optimism shown in many American movies.
The vision of the existing poverty and despair, presented by theneorealist films, was demoralising a nation anxious for prosperity and change.
The views of the postwar Italian government of the time were also far from positive, and the remark of Giulio Andreotti, who was then a vice-minister in the De Gasperi cabinet, characterised the official view of the movement: Neorealism is "dirty laundry that shouldn't be washed and hung to dry in the open."
Italian Neorealism Ideological characteristics -
A new democratic spirit, with emphasison the value of ordinary people
A compassionate point of view and arefusal to make facile (easy) moral judgements
A preoccupation with Italy's Fascist pastand its aftermath of wartime devastation
A blending of Christian and Marxisthumanism
An emphasis on emotions rather thanabstract ideas
Italian Neorealism Stylistic attributes
A documentary visual style
An avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favorof loose, episodic structures that evolve organically
The use of actual locations--usually exteriors--rather than studio sites
The use of nonprofessional actors, even forprincipal roles
Use of conversational speech, not literarydialogue
Avoidance of artifice in editing, camerawork, Dubbing of dialoguesand lighting in favor of a simple "styless" style
Italian Neorealism Impact around the world
From Wikipedia: The period between 1943 and 1950 in the history of Italian cinema is dominated by the impact of neorealism, which is properly defined as a moment or a trend in Italian film, rather than an actual school or group of theoretically motivated and like-minded directors and scriptwriters. Its impact nevertheless has been enormous. It heavily influenced French New Wave cinema, the Polish Film School and ultimately on films all over the world. It also influenced film directors of India's Parallel Cinema movement, including Satyajit Ray (who directed the award-winning Apu Trilogy) and Bimal Roy (who made Do Bigha Zameen (1953)), both heavily influenced by Vittorio De Sica'sBicycle Thieves (1948).[6] Furthermore, as some critics have argued, the abandoning of the classical way of doing cinema and so the starting point of the Nouvelle Vague and the Modern Cinema can be found in the post world-war II Italian cinema and in the neorealism experiences. [7] [8]
Major Films and Directors:
Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1942)
Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)
Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948) Nights of Cabiria ( Federico Fellini 1957) Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951) Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951) Rome 11:00 (Giuseppe De Santis, 1952) Europe '51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) — filmed in 1951, but released in 1952. Many film historians date the end of the neorealist movement with the public attacks on the film.
Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
The French New Wave (late1950s-1960s)
In 1948, the French director Alexandre Astruc (b.1923) creates the famous theory of camera- stylo (camera Pan).
Professing that true cinema should be like literature - subtle and rich in meaning.
Directors are to be considered authors ("auteurs" in french) of their films in the true literary sense of the world.
Three years later, influenced by Astruc's concept, Andre Bazin (1918-58) cofounds CASHIERS DU CINEMA.
Claude Charbrol, Jean - Luc Godard and Francious Truffaut collectively known as CINEPHILES (film lovers) the cashiers group becomes famous for theoretical writing on world cinema.
Cinephiles ideology and embraces two aspects of the filmmaking.
MISE-EN-SCENE - The basis of psychological and intellectual structure of A film ( thus the montage theory is rejected )
THE AUTEUR ("Author" in English) THEORY - Each film should carry the individual signature of its director, both in the aesthetics and ideological context ( does the principle of impersonal studio production is rejected)
Before the end of the decade most of the casheirs critics decide to put their theories to the ultimate test.
They begin to makemovies of their own.
Cinephiles became Cineasters (filmmakers with an artistic agenda)
Techniques :
Unprecedented methods of expression - long tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End).
Existential themes - stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. Filled with irony and sarcasm.
The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations.
For example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle), after being told the film was too long and he must cut it down to one hour and a half he decided (on the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) to remove several scenes from the feature using jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that did not work were simply cut from the middle of the take, a practical decision and also a purposeful stylistic one.
TOP 10 French New wave Films
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
Jules and Jim (1962)
Breathless (1960)
A Woman Is a Woman (1961)
Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Contempt (1963)
New Hollywood
or post-classical Hollywood, sometimes referred to as the "American New Wave",
The end of the Hollywood studio system and the era of independent cinema.
New Hollywood refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) to the early 1980s (Heaven's Gate, One from the Heart) when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in United States, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached filmmaking. In New Hollywood films, the film director took on a key authorial role.
Contemporary Period (1980s-Today)
Spectacular epics which took advantage of new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided into two categories: Blockbusters (big budget) and Independent films (small budget).
Blockbuster Film (Big budget, spectacular) Gladiator (2000)
Independent Film: (low budget, relies on good story, style, ingenuity. It is important to remember though, that "Independent" still, most of the time, has budgets in the millions of dollars and the people working on them and in them are connected to the industry. Independent means independent of the big studios, not independent of the people already connected to people who have probably worked with the big studios.) Lost in Translation (2003)
The Beginnings: Shanghai as the Center (The First Golden Age)
Motion pictures were introduced to China in 1896
The first Chinese film, "The Battle of Dingjunshan," was made in November 1905.
Shanghai was the center of film in China
Chinese technicians worked with American filmmakers to advance this new art form
Japanese invasion of China in ended this First Golden Age
The Second Golden Age: the late 1940s, and the Communist Era
Many films were political, against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party
Others documented the Sino-Japanese War experience
Spring in a Small Town (1948), thought by many critics to be the best Chinese movie ever made.
With the Communist takeover in 1949, the government saw motion pictures as an important mass production art form and propaganda.
Soviet influence in Chinese film making
In the 1980s the film industry fell on hard times
In January 1986 the film industry was transferred from the Ministry of Culture to the newly formed Ministry of Radio, Cinema, and Television to bring it under "stricter control and management" and to "strengthen supervision over production."
The Cultural Revolution and its Aftermath
Furongzhenposter.jpg
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1972), the film industry was severely restricted.
Almost all previous films were banned, and only a few new ones were produced.
In the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, the film industry again flourished
The industry tried to revive crowds by making more innovative and "exploratory" films which take in ideas from the West.
The end of the Cultural Revolution brought the release of "scar dramas", which depicted the emotional traumas left by this period
The Rise of the Fifth Generation
Beginning in the mid-late 1980s, the rise of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers brought increased popularity of Chinese cinema abroad.
jettisioned traditional methods of storytelling and opted for a more free and liberal approach. Many movies exported to Western arthouse theaters with success Tian Zhuangzhuang's films, though less well-known by Western viewers, were well-noted by directors such as Martin Scorsese.
The Fifth Generation movement effectively ended in the Tiananmen_Square_protests|1989 Tiananmen Incident, although its major directors continued to produce notable works. Several of its filmmakers went into self-imposed exile: Wu Tianming stayed in the United States, Huang Jianxin left for Australia, while many others went into television-related works.
Sixth Generation and Beyond
Beijing Bicycle (2001) Poster
The recent era has seen the "return of the amateur filmmaker" as state censorship policies have produced an edgy underground film movement loosely referred to as the Sixth Generation
These films are shot quickly and cheaply, which produces a documentary feel: long takes, hand-held cameras, ambient sound
Unlike the Fifth Generation, the Sixth Generation brings a more individualistic, anti-romantic life-view and pays more attention to contemporary urban life, especially affected by disorientation.
A New Chinese International Cinema
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999)
In 1999, the multi-national production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon achieved massive success at the Western box office despite being disregarded by some Chinese cinema-goers as pandering to Western tastes. Nevertheless, it provided an introduction to Chinese cinema for many and increased the popularity of many Chinese films which may have otherwise been relatively unknown to Westerners.
In 2002, Hero (movie)|Hero was made as a second attempt to produce a Chinese film with the international appeal of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The cast and crew featured many of the most famous Chinese actors who were also known to some extent in the West, including Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, and Zhang Yimou. The film was a phenomenal success in most of Asia and topped the U.S. box office for two weeks, making enough in the U.S. alone to cover the production costs.
The successes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero blur the boundary between what is Mainland Chinese cinema and a more international-based Chinese-language cinema. Crouching Tiger, for example, was made by a Taiwanese director, but its leads include Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland Chinese actors and actresses; the funding is from overseas. This merging of people, resources, and expertise from three regions (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) meant Chinese-language cinema is moving toward an international Chinese arena.
Film History
Eras of Cinema
Silent Era (1895-1929)
German Expressionism (1910-1930)
The Rise of The Studio System (1920-1930)
Classical Hollywood or The Golden Age of Hollywood (1930s-1948)
Film Noir (1940-1958)
Italian Neorealism (1944–1952) "The Golden Age" of Italian Cinema
French New Wave (late1950s-1960s)
New Hollywood or post-Classical Hollywood, or "American New Wave" (late1960s- early1980s)
Contemporary Period (1980s-Today)
Chinese Film (A short history)
Resource sites:
www.filmsite.orgwww.filmnoir.com
a full list of web resources are in the IB DP Film Resources Tab on the right
Silent Era
http://www.silentera.com/From Filmsite.org:
Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast.
By the mid-20s, movies were big business (with a capital investment totaling over $2 billion) with some theatres offering double features. By the end of the decade, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the demand for films was greater than ever. Most people are unaware that the greatest output of feature films in the US occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (averaging about 800 film releases in a year) - nowadays, Hollywood usually produces less than 500 films in a year.
Throughout most of the decade, silent films were the predominant product of the film industry, having evolved from vaudevillian roots. But the films were becoming bigger (or longer), costlier, and more polished.
They were being manufactured, assembly-line style, in Hollywood's 'entertainment factories,' in which production was broken down and organized into its various components (writing, costuming, makeup, directing, etc.).
Even the earliest films were organized into genres or types, with instantly-recognizable storylines, settings, costumes, and characters.The major genre emphasis was on swashbucklers, historical extravaganzas, and melodramas, although all kinds of films were being produced throughout the decade.
Films varied from sexy melodramas and biblical epics by Cecil B. DeMille, to westerns (such as Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923)), horror films, gangster/crime films, war films, the first feature documentary or non-fictional narrative film (Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922)), romances, mysteries, and comedies (from the silent comic masters Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd).
Important Films from the Silent Era
The General 1926 Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman USA
Metropolis 1927 Fritz Lang Germany
Sunrise 1927 F.W. Murnau USA
City Lights 1931 Charles Chaplin USA
Nosferatu 1922 F.W. Murnau Germany
The Gold Rush 1925 Charles Chaplin USA
La passion et la mort de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] 1928 Carl Theodor DreyerFrance
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] 1920 Robert WieneGermany
Bronenosets ‘Potyomkin’ [The Battleship Potemkin] 1925 Sergei M. Eisenstein USSR
Greed 1924 Erich von Stroheim USA
Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box] 1929 G.W. Pabst Germany
The Birth of a Nation 1915 D.W. Griffith USA
Nanook of the North (first successful feature length documentary film) 1922 Robert Flaherty USA
Important Directors from the Silent Era
German Expressionism
German Expressionism is a film movement that emphasizes on the expression of inner thoughts or emotions through the control of stylistic elements.
German Expressionism was very influential and it's influence began appearing in Hollywood films in the late 30s and 40s.
The film movement, having born directly under the influenced of German’s defeat during World War I, was an expressive form used to describe the mentality of a defeated nation stricken with poverty and anger.
German Expressionist films are therefore notable for their dark themes of insanity, horror, death and fatality that translate prevalently into the film’s mise-en-scene and narrative.
It counters the principle of realism and practices extreme distortion as means to communicate inner emotional reality.
Old ideals and conventional photographic representation of reality is discarded to convey messages in heavy stylization that becomes symbolic of the real world.
The story takes place in a constructed reality in which the characters live in a world of deformity.
This is done to express a subjective viewpoint by abstracting realistic details and contingencies, bringing out the essence of an object, situation or state of mind.
The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects.
The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal and other "intellectual" topics.
Two genres that were especially influenced by Expressionism are horror film and film noir.
Significant Themes
A fascination with the enticing yet often wretched experiences of modern urban life.
The enduring solace associated with nature and religion.
The naked body and its potential to signify primal emotion
Emotionally charged portraiture
And, most pivotally, the need to confront the devastating experience of World War I and its aftermath.
Formal Elements
Chiaroscuro lighting: lighting that employs extreme contrasts of light and dark, thus creating dramatic shadows.
A preoccupation with mirrors, glass, and other reflective surfaces.
The use of anthropomorphism, which is the attribution of a human form, human characteristics, or human behavior to non- human things.
An interest in abstractionism, which is a style of art that privileges internal form over pictorial representation
- Nancy West from the University of Missouri,Columbia
German Expressionism MAJOR FILMS
The Student of Prague (1913)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
From Morn to Midnight (1920)
The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920)
Destiny (1922) Nosferatu (1922) Phantom (1922) Schatten (1923)
The Last Laugh (1924)
The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System (1920s-1930s)
The studio system was essentially born with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars by the studio's production chief and in-house publicity departments.The studio system was dominated by the Big 5. The Big 5 were the studios that controlled Hollywood:
The Big 5
1. Metro-Golden-Mayer
2. Warner Brothers
3. Paramount
4. Fox Film (renamed 20th Century Fox in 1935)
5. RKO
From www.filmsite.org:
The Big-Five studios had vast studios with elaborate sets for film production. They owned their own film-exhibiting theatres (about 50% of the seating capacity in the US in mostly first-run houses in major cities), as well as production and distribution facilities. They distributed their films to this network of studio-owned, first-run theaters (or movie palaces), mostly in urban areas, which charged high ticket prices and drew huge audiences.
They required blind or block bookings of films, whereby theatre owners were required to rent a block of films (often cheaply-made, less-desirable B-pictures) in order for the studio to agree to distribute the one prestige A-level picture that the theatre owner wanted to exhibit. This technique set the terms for a film's release and patterns of exhibition and guaranteed success for the studio's productions.
The Small Three
1. Universal
2. United Artists
3. Columbia
United Artists was formed in 1919 by movie industry icons Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and director D.W. Griffith as an independent company to produce and distribute their films.
The studio system would dominate for 3 decades before losing its tight grip over the American film industry at the end of The Golden Age of Hollywood in the late 1940s.
Classical Hollywood (1930-1945) or The Golden Age of Hollywood (1930s-1948)
The 1930s decade (and most of the 1940s as well) has been nostalgically labeled "The Golden Age of Hollywood" (although most of the output of the decade was black-and-white).
The 30s was also the decade of the sound and color revolutions and the advance of the 'talkies', and the further development of film genres (gangster films, musicals, newspaper-reporting films, historical biopics, social-realism films, lighthearted screwball comedies, westerns and horror to name a few).
It was the era in which the silent period ended.
In the late 30s, the two most famous color films were produced: **The Wizard of Oz (1939)** and **Gone with the Wind (1939)**, with Technicolor, which was very expensive. Special-effects processes were advanced by the late 1930s, making it possible for many more films to be shot on sets rather than on-location.
In 1937, the Disney-produced **Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)** was the first feature-length animated film - a milestone.
The End of the 1940s, and the Beginning of the End of the Studio System:
At the end of this decade, reeling from depression, WWII, problems of the return to peacetime, and the ominous arrival of the atomic bomb, the world was a more cynical, chaotic, economically-unsure and film-noirish place. Lawsuits stripped the studios of their lucrative practices. By the late 1940s, the motion picture industry surely faced its period of greatest crisis and challenge, with the depressing bleakness of the Cold War on the horizon.
Hollywood suddenly found itself with many threatening forces at the close of the 40s and the start of the next decade:
Now that the studios would have to achieve box-office success based not on their marketplace strength but on the quality of their films the stability of the studio system of marketing was severely threatened and began to crumble. They were pressured to usher in an era of competition, free agent stars and auteur directors, and many of them were forced to begin selling film rights to pre-1948 films to television to bolster profits.
Film Noir (1940s-50s) (Black Cinema)
http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.htmlThe transition from The Golden Age in Hollywood to Film Noir shows how film is influenced by the sociocultural realities of the world at a given point in history. During The Golden Age of Hollywood, films were dreamy, fantastic, escapist, and fun. That was before World War II. After the war, the world changed and film did as well. Enter Film Noir.
The Name Film Noir (French black cinema) derives from the French published novels (Serie Noire - the black series).
Coined by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 who noticed a group of Dark and cynical American crime and detective films released in France theater following the war.
Noir movies are almost invariably set in an urban environment and display high contrast lighting which produce hard and unfriendly shadows.
Characterized by the sense of impending disaster and utter fatalism, These pictures find their roots in the German Cinema of the 1920’s.
Film Noir contains a set of Archetypical Characters:
Characteristics:•Melancholy
•Alienated
•Bleakness
•Disillusionment
•Disenchantment
•Pessimism
•Ambiguity
•Moral corruption
•Evil
•Desperation
•Paranoia
PRIMARY Characteristics
Heroes are corrupt characters. Distinctively cynical, tarnished, obsessive, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure.
Villains include down and out, conflicted hard-boiled detective or Private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, alone wolf, a socio-path,crooks , war veterans, politicians, petty criminals, murderers.
Storyline - elliptical, non-linear and twisting.
Narratives - Frequently complex, maze- like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), witty, razor- sharp and acerbic dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration.
Plot - Amnesia suffered by the protagonist was a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent man who fell victim to temptation or was framed. Revelations regarding the hero were made to explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life.
Camera and Lighting- Expressionistic lighting•Deep-focus or depth of field camera work,
•Disorienting visual schemes
•Juxtaposition of elements
•Ominous shadows
•Skewed camera angles (usually vertical or diagonal rather than horizontal),
•Circling cigarette smoke
Camera and Lighting-
•Unbalanced or moody compositions.
•Settings were often interiors with low-key (or single-source) lighting
•Venetian-blinded windows and rooms, and dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances.
•Exteriors were often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleyways, rain-slicked or mean streets, flashing neon lights, and low key lighting.
•Story locations were often in murky and dark streets, dimly-lit and low-rent apartments and hotel rooms of big cities, or abandoned warehouses. [Often-times, war-time scarcities were the reason for the reduced budgets and shadowy, stark sets of B-pictures and film noirs.]
Prominent Directors
•Orsen Welles
•John Huston
•Billy Wilder
•Edgar Ulmer
•Douglas Sirk
•Robert Siodmak
•Fritz Lang
•Otto Perminger
•Henry Hathway
•And Howard Hawks
Noir Films -
•Citizen Kane (1941)
•The Maltese Falcon (1941)
•The Gun for Hire (1942)
•Double Indemnity (1944)
•The Blue Dahlia (1946)
•Out of The Past (1947)
•The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
•The White Heat (1949)
•Touch of Evil (1958)
•Psycho (1960)
•The Trial (1962)
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Italian Neorealism (1944-1952) (aka Golden Age of Italian Cinema)
Films about the poor and working class, "realism." Roberto Rossellini, one of Italian neo-realism's pre-eminent directors, defined it as, “above all a moral position from which to look at the world”. Coming in the wake of studio-bound melodramas of the Fascist regime – ‘white telephone’ films – neo-realist films demonstrated a new social consciousness, with their emphasis on working class hardship and the daily struggle to get by in post-war Italy, where the shadow of defeat lay over its material conditions of economic hardship in war-damaged cities.
Italian Neorealism HistoryItalian Neorealism came about as World War II ended and Benito Mussolini's government fell, causing the Italian film industry to lose its centre.
Neorealism was a sign of cultural change and social progress in Italy.
•The first neorealist film is generally thought to be Obsession by Luchino Visconti (1943).
•Neorealism became famous globally in 1946 with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival as the first major film produced in Italy after the war.
•Italian Neorealism rapidly declined in the early 1950s.
•Liberal and socialist parties were having a hard time presenting their message.
•Levels of income were gradually starting to rise and the first positive effects of the Italian economic miracle period began to show. As a consequence, most Italians favoured the optimism shown in many American movies.
The vision of the existing poverty and despair, presented by theneorealist films, was demoralising a nation anxious for prosperity and change.
The views of the postwar Italian government of the time were also far from positive, and the remark of Giulio Andreotti, who was then a vice-minister in the De Gasperi cabinet, characterised the official view of the movement: Neorealism is "dirty laundry that shouldn't be washed and hung to dry in the open."
Italian Neorealism Ideological characteristics -
A new democratic spirit, with emphasison the value of ordinary people
A compassionate point of view and arefusal to make facile (easy) moral judgements
A preoccupation with Italy's Fascist pastand its aftermath of wartime devastation
A blending of Christian and Marxisthumanism
An emphasis on emotions rather thanabstract ideas
Italian Neorealism Stylistic attributesA documentary visual style
An avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favorof loose, episodic structures that evolve organically
The use of actual locations--usually exteriors--rather than studio sites
The use of nonprofessional actors, even forprincipal roles
Use of conversational speech, not literarydialogue
Avoidance of artifice in editing, camerawork, Dubbing of dialoguesand lighting in favor of a simple "styless" style
Italian Neorealism Impact around the world
From Wikipedia:The period between 1943 and 1950 in the history of Italian cinema is dominated by the impact of neorealism, which is properly defined as a moment or a trend in Italian film, rather than an actual school or group of theoretically motivated and like-minded directors and scriptwriters. Its impact nevertheless has been enormous.
It heavily influenced French New Wave cinema, the Polish Film School and ultimately on films all over the world. It also influenced film directors of India's Parallel Cinema movement, including Satyajit Ray (who directed the award-winning Apu Trilogy) and Bimal Roy (who made Do Bigha Zameen (1953)), both heavily influenced by Vittorio De Sica'sBicycle Thieves (1948).[6]
Furthermore, as some critics have argued, the abandoning of the classical way of doing cinema and so the starting point of the Nouvelle Vague and the Modern Cinema can be found in the post world-war II Italian cinema and in the neorealism experiences. [7] [8]
Major Films and Directors:
Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1942)
Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)
Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948) Nights of Cabiria ( Federico Fellini 1957) Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951) Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951) Rome 11:00 (Giuseppe De Santis, 1952) Europe '51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) — filmed in 1951, but released in 1952. Many film historians date the end of the neorealist movement with the public attacks on the film.
Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
The French New Wave (late1950s-1960s)
In 1948, the French director Alexandre Astruc (b.1923) creates the famous theory of camera- stylo (camera Pan).Professing that true cinema should be like literature - subtle and rich in meaning.
Directors are to be considered authors ("auteurs" in french) of their films in the true literary sense of the world.
Three years later, influenced by Astruc's concept, Andre Bazin (1918-58) cofounds CASHIERS DU CINEMA.
Claude Charbrol, Jean - Luc Godard and Francious Truffaut collectively known as CINEPHILES (film lovers) the cashiers group becomes famous for theoretical writing on world cinema.
Cinephiles ideology and embraces two aspects of the filmmaking.
MISE-EN-SCENE - The basis of psychological and intellectual structure of A film ( thus the montage theory is rejected )
THE AUTEUR ("Author" in English) THEORY - Each film should carry the individual signature of its director, both in the aesthetics and ideological context ( does the principle of impersonal studio production is rejected)
Before the end of the decade most of the casheirs critics decide to put their theories to the ultimate test.
They begin to makemovies of their own.
Cinephiles became Cineasters (filmmakers with an artistic agenda)
Techniques :Unprecedented methods of expression - long tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End).
Existential themes - stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence. Filled with irony and sarcasm.
The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations.
For example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle), after being told the film was too long and he must cut it down to one hour and a half he decided (on the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) to remove several scenes from the feature using jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take. Parts that did not work were simply cut from the middle of the take, a practical decision and also a purposeful stylistic one.
TOP 10 French New wave Films
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
Jules and Jim (1962)
Breathless (1960)
A Woman Is a Woman (1961)
Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Contempt (1963)
New Hollywood
or post-classical Hollywood, sometimes referred to as the "American New Wave",The end of the Hollywood studio system and the era of independent cinema.
New Hollywood refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) to the early 1980s (Heaven's Gate, One from the Heart) when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in United States, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached filmmaking. In New Hollywood films, the film director took on a key authorial role.
Contemporary Period (1980s-Today)
Spectacular epics which took advantage of new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided into two categories: Blockbusters (big budget) and Independent films (small budget).
Blockbuster Film (Big budget, spectacular)
Gladiator (2000)
Independent Film: (low budget, relies on good story, style, ingenuity. It is important to remember though, that "Independent" still, most of the time, has budgets in the millions of dollars and the people working on them and in them are connected to the industry. Independent means independent of the big studios, not independent of the people already connected to people who have probably worked with the big studios.)
Lost in Translation (2003)
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Chinese Film
Periods of Chinese Film
Taken from: http://www.foreignercn.com/ The History of Chinese CinemaThe Beginnings: Shanghai as the Center (The First Golden Age)
Motion pictures were introduced to China in 1896
The first Chinese film, "The Battle of Dingjunshan," was made in November 1905.
Shanghai was the center of film in China
Chinese technicians worked with American filmmakers to advance this new art form
Japanese invasion of China in ended this First Golden Age
The Second Golden Age: the late 1940s, and the Communist Era
Many films were political, against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party
Others documented the Sino-Japanese War experience
Spring in a Small Town (1948), thought by many critics to be the best Chinese movie ever made.
With the Communist takeover in 1949, the government saw motion pictures as an important mass production art form and propaganda.
Soviet influence in Chinese film making
In the 1980s the film industry fell on hard times
In January 1986 the film industry was transferred from the Ministry of Culture to the newly formed Ministry of Radio, Cinema, and Television to bring it under "stricter control and management" and to "strengthen supervision over production."
The Cultural Revolution and its Aftermath
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1972), the film industry was severely restricted.
Almost all previous films were banned, and only a few new ones were produced.
In the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, the film industry again flourished
The industry tried to revive crowds by making more innovative and "exploratory" films which take in ideas from the West.
The end of the Cultural Revolution brought the release of "scar dramas", which depicted the emotional traumas left by this period
The Rise of the Fifth Generation
Beginning in the mid-late 1980s, the rise of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers brought increased popularity of Chinese cinema abroad.
jettisioned traditional methods of storytelling and opted for a more free and liberal approach.
Many movies exported to Western arthouse theaters with success
Tian Zhuangzhuang's films, though less well-known by Western viewers, were well-noted by directors such as Martin Scorsese.
The Fifth Generation movement effectively ended in the Tiananmen_Square_protests|1989 Tiananmen Incident, although its major directors continued to produce notable works. Several of its filmmakers went into self-imposed exile: Wu Tianming stayed in the United States, Huang Jianxin left for Australia, while many others went into television-related works.
Sixth Generation and Beyond
The recent era has seen the "return of the amateur filmmaker" as state censorship policies have produced an edgy underground film movement loosely referred to as the Sixth Generation
These films are shot quickly and cheaply, which produces a documentary feel: long takes, hand-held cameras, ambient sound
Unlike the Fifth Generation, the Sixth Generation brings a more individualistic, anti-romantic life-view and pays more attention to contemporary urban life, especially affected by disorientation.
A New Chinese International Cinema
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999)
In 1999, the multi-national production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon achieved massive success at the Western box office despite being disregarded by some Chinese cinema-goers as pandering to Western tastes. Nevertheless, it provided an introduction to Chinese cinema for many and increased the popularity of many Chinese films which may have otherwise been relatively unknown to Westerners.
In 2002, Hero (movie)|Hero was made as a second attempt to produce a Chinese film with the international appeal of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The cast and crew featured many of the most famous Chinese actors who were also known to some extent in the West, including Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, and Zhang Yimou. The film was a phenomenal success in most of Asia and topped the U.S. box office for two weeks, making enough in the U.S. alone to cover the production costs.
The successes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero blur the boundary between what is Mainland Chinese cinema and a more international-based Chinese-language cinema. Crouching Tiger, for example, was made by a Taiwanese director, but its leads include Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland Chinese actors and actresses; the funding is from overseas. This merging of people, resources, and expertise from three regions (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) meant Chinese-language cinema is moving toward an international Chinese arena.
Read more at:
http://www.foreignercn.com/ The History of Chinese Cinema
http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/film/84966.htm
Miscellaneous
South Korean film makers get kidnapped and taken to North Korea
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=556